Fig & Thistle Opening Next Month in Hayes Valley

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It’s been almost a full year since we first heard about Fig & Thistle (313 Ivy Street), a tiny new wine bar slated for a former therapist’s office on an alley just off of Gough. The people behind the project are former Alembic staffer Angel Davis and Nguey Lay, and their hope is to create a comfortable, cozy space that’s both mellow enough for locals and nice enough for a date spot. As with all things, there have been numerous delays and obstacles to getting open, and as Davis tells Grub Street, “Since it wasn’t a restaurant or bar space before, there’s a lot of possibilities for little things not being to code by like a couple inches.” It’s a 500-square-foot space and the focus of the wine list will be California single-varietal wines, with ten whites and ten reds by the glass. Also, there will be twenty beers by the bottle, all of them domestic craft brews.

Davis is still working on developing a reserve bottle list, and she adds, “I’ve been super fortunate in that I’ve been able to meet a lot of the winemakers. That’s one thing we wanted to do was to know everyone we bought wine from.”

There will also be a concise list of snack options, mostly charcuterie from nearby Fatted Calf, and cheeses from Tomales Bay.

Design-wise, she says she’s keeping things “simple and pretty,” with redwood slab tables, denim curtains, and white walls. And a high-school friend who’s a sculptor, Mark Baugh-Sasaki, will be doing some custom barstools.

If all goes well with their final inspections, Davis hopes to be open by May 15, but they’ve scheduled their official grand opening event for June 1, just in case.